


That Didn’t Stop You Before

by Kate_Christie



Series: Fictober 2020 [4]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode: s07e11 Shattered (Star Trek: Voyager), F/M, Fictober 2020, j/c - Freeform, temporal paradoxes give me a headache
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26865385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kate_Christie/pseuds/Kate_Christie
Summary: Immediate post-ep for Shattered, (J/C, Voyager, s07e11) which makes some assumptions that canon might or might not agree with.
Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway
Series: Fictober 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951720
Comments: 20
Kudos: 80





	That Didn’t Stop You Before

“Temporal Prime Directive.” Smirking, she took a drink of her cider, pleased with herself at giving him a taste of his own medicine. 

Sipping in silence, she watched his face as he studied his glass. His smile sparkled at first, then faded to just shy of wistful. There was something more he wanted to share, despite what his words had said.

“Seven found your cider stash when she was searching for Borg components. She reported it to me as contraband.” It was an olive branch, whether he chose to accept it was his decision.

Chakotay’s eyes snapped to hers. 

“You really want to know, don’t you?”

Now she was sure he wanted to tell her something that hadn’t appeared in his bare-bones report on the incident. The sudden intensity of his expression, the way it held hers, told her this was personal. Of course that only piqued her curiosity more.

“I must have had so many questions, seeing what happened to Voyager in all those futures I had never experienced.”

“You did.” His answer was neutral, but at least he was talking. “I did my best not to answer them.”

Leaning in, she set her glass on the table and propped her elbows on her knees. Ever since she had read her alternate self had come from the a time just before Voyager left the Alpha Quadrant, there was one thing she had been dying to know.

“I suppose the real question I have is, if you were the renegade Maquis captain I had been sent to capture, and you appeared out of nowhere spouting some story about fractured timelines, why on earth would I agree to work with you to save my ship? I had no reason to trust a word you said.” 

“That didn’t stop you before.” One corner of his mouth twitched up.

“Touché. But I had the benefit of at least a little bit of time and some experience watching you with your crew. I presume my counterpart did not.” 

“No. She only had her instinct.” Now he shifted forward in his seat and set down his empty glass, mirroring her with a secretive little smile on his face.

“So, you tell me, what was my instinct?”

“I believe you said ‘A good lie is easier to believe than the truth.’” He was grinning as he remembered. “But I was pretty persuasive in my use of evidence to make my case.”

“I trusted you.” Almost seven years ago, and she still remembered the flash of certainty on that very first day that Chakotay was as good as his word. “I still do.”

Chancing a glance at him, she found his eyes fixed on hers. Reaching out his hand, he covered both of hers, laced together between her knees.

“She asked me how close you and I got.” 

So that was the revelation. It sent a tingle up her spine to think about her younger self, what that version might think of her now. Kathryn took his offered hand in one of hers, let it drift halfway between them, bridging the gap.

“And... what did you tell her?” 

“That there were some barriers we never crossed.” His eyes dropped to the floor, unfocused, as if he were traveling to one of those other timelines in his memory.

“Why didn’t you tell her the truth?” 

“Some things deserve to stay private.” His words fit with the protectiveness she felt about their relationship. “Besides, I think she knew.”

“If you behaved around her like you do around me, of course she knew.” Her voice rose in the tease as her fingers squeezed his tight, and it earned her a soft chuckle. 

“Time travel paradoxes are my least favorite subject, but humor me for a moment. Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you were going to reset the timeline, and therefore what happened to you never really happened to that version of me at all, what harm would there have been in telling my counterpart the details? It would be like you were making up a fictional version of us, like telling a story.”

“Remember who you're talking about, Kathryn. At one point she tried to redirect the reset of all the fractures to her timeline—to stop Voyager from ever entering the Delta Quadrant.”

“From what little I could make out from your report, after everything she saw of our future, it’s hard to blame her, really.” She could see herself wanting to avoid the loss of life, the sadness and separation. “How did you convince her not to?”

“I told her the truth. For all the hardships and the losses, getting thrown so far off course gave us great opportunities, not the least of which was developing relationships with the family we found along the way.”

“Now that I can agree with. But I still think you could have told her about us.” A tiny spark of hope swirled in her chest with the waves of regret. Maybe if someone had told her way back then that it was possible...

“What would you have had me tell her? About all the barriers we crossed on New Earth?” His eyes smiled from under arched brows and there was a lilt of teasing in his tone. It had been the only time they’d crossed some of them. 

But his tone begged for humor, not honesty. Considering the day he’d had, saving the ship and the timeline, she could give that to him.

“Or in the turbo lift?” The corner of her mouth turned up though her voice stayed deadpan. “Or on the holodeck?”

“Or on this couch?” Chakotay nodded to the cushion where she sat.

“ _ This _ couch? What about the  _ ready room _ couch?” She motioned up and back in the general direction of the bridge with her free hand, her other one still firmly entwined with his. “If it’s fiction anyway, might as well make it a good story.”

His smile softened as his voice dropped low once again.

“It never did have to be fiction, you know.” Holding her hand steady between them, he stroked his thumb along hers, and her gaze fell to that tiny, smooth motion as it sent goosebumps up her arm.

“I know, and it wasn’t, for a little while.” Her voice sounded foreign to her ears, half an octave lower than just a moment earlier. Images of them together flashed rapid-fire through her mind—clear as if they had happened yesterday—bringing warmth bubbling up in her chest.

“It could be real again.” Bringing their hands up, he sandwiched hers between both of his, the gentle persistence of his grip so very persuasive. And again, she wanted to trust him. But not every answer was as simple as working with him, leading a crew with him.

“But has anything actually changed? The problems with  _ us _ being real on this ship are just as real as they ever were.” They were as real as her position at the top of a finite command structure, and her bone-deep fear that she might lose her objectivity. 

She was quiet then, trying to swallow down the instinct to fight the same fight yet again, battling with the cold, hollow sadness that always came when she thought of what they could have been in some other life.

“That’s just it—I think the problems you see have always been fiction. Futures—alternate timelines—invented around worst case scenarios that may never happen—that almost certainly won’t happen.” He sounded so sure, shifting closer and dropping to the floor so she couldn’t look anywhere but into his face. “What’s real—what matters— is who we are and what we do in the present, not what might never happen in the future.” 

Moisture pooled at the corners of her eyes, stinging and blurring and threatening to escape. More than anything she wanted him to hold her, to whisper to her that everything would be fine, because at that moment, she would have believed him.

“The reason I didn’t tell that other version of you what happened between us,” his voice had risen again, pushing through to the thing he’d been trying to tell her all night, “was that part of me still hopes in her timeline she finds a way to make a different decision.”

A tear did spill over then, but she didn’t care. All she could see was a man she loved begging the universe for a chance to love her back.

Something snapped inside her chest. Years of layers of icy cold fear popped and cracked into a web of tiny fault lines that finally shattered into a million sparkling points of light.

Leaning in, she followed her instinct.

**Author's Note:**

> Alex, as always, many thanks. And thank you to all for reading.


End file.
